Comedy legend Sinbad came to the NewTek booth at NAB 2017 to look at getting the essentials for his newest project, a new Internet channel with multiple shows. Sinbad was among the first to pioneer making shows for “Internet TV,” well before video became a thing, let alone the biggest thing, on the Internet. He used NewTek’s Video Toaster and Flyer for productions back in the day. The new projects include one program dedicated to creating fake news, with participation invited from anyone in the world with a smartphone and an outrageous imagination. Skype will bring these reporters and guests into the studio in his guest house, where he will use TriCaster virtual set technology to “make it look like a multi-million dollar set.”

Sinbad’s take is that we’ve reached the future where shows are created directly by anyone with an idea and offered to audiences with no intervening gatekeepers. Anyone can create and publish content on any number of platforms or directly from their own social media accounts or website. The result isn’t always something great, and is no longer a one-way street, but is instead an interaction. A lot of performers are not sure how to adapt to this new world.

“There’s a lot of stuff that sucks out there, that’s got followers - you’ve got cats with four million followers, some guy who can’t dance with two million followers,” Sinbad observed. “So people with talent are saying ‘how do I get back on?’ Entertainers are sometimes the last ones to grab onto the technology…they say ‘I want to do a show, I need to get a budget.’ I say ‘Look man, you gonna let a kid that dances with a dog beat you?’”

If talented entertainers can get past the shock and awe of the new content consumption landscape and embrace the technology and the potential, they will stand out and succeed, Sinbad feels. “When you have talent and the technology, [content] goes to a whole new level.”

Please enjoy our interview with Sinbad for more insights on the future of entertainment media and inside info on his upcoming projects.